Quantum Metric - Senior Software Engineer
January 2023 - Present | Redmond, WA, USA
As a Senior Software Engineer, I became the SME (Subject Matter Expert) in many areas to help fulfil the fast moving and constantly changing requirements of working in a startup environment. I worked directly with our SVP of Engineering to create a highly technical feature, Focus Mode, that introduced an entirely new solution to querying for data from our Big Query data warehouse within a specific user defined context. I piloted a service creation workflow by learning Go (Golang) from scratch, and standing up a query caching service for ad hoc queries to be sent off when an alert is fired. I worked closely with our product and field teams via Jira to collaborate on critical features and quirks of our platform, from data visualization to mathematical statistics problems.
I've also started taking on a lot more responsibility that falls under a staff role. I've orchestrated discussions around unit testing (and what constitutes meaningful tests) in our codebase, and laid the foundation of Jest and React Testing Library unit tests with initial unit tests, mocks, and Gitlab pipeline configurations. This lead to the entire engineering department adopting the culture of unit testing, greatly improving our codebase and increased our resilience against regressions. I've promoted a culture of documentation and education, by adding vital coverage to legacy and core portions of the codebase that is less well understood and excruciatingly hard to maintain. I've strongly encouraged peers to not be afraid to dig deep into legacy code, and have volunteered countless hours to guiding them along the process of learning to navigate legacy code, such as our home grown state management based off Redux or Class Based React components. I have also frequently attended meetings in the place of, or in addition to, staff engineers to provide a more technical insight to the discussion at hand, whether that's dissecting the feasibility of a new feature or architecting a new solution across engineering departments.
Additionally, I have also had a lasting impact on our company's platform. I was a fundamental part of the effort to improve the less than desirable performance, by breaking down legacy code and experimenting with various fixes such as adjusting our Web Worker configurations, optimizing legacy code, and benchmarking various solutions. This led to a reduction of query time from over 5 seconds to around 3 seconds for data heavy clients. On the security side, a security audit deemed our platform needed an upgrade to HTTPOnly (disable client side script access to cookies). I collaborated with a staff engineer to complete this upgrade in time for the security audit deadline to ensure we were up to date with security best practices. Lastly, and most recently, I was heavily involved with multiple features that helped secure a >$10 million USD deal with a major US telecommunications client, by providing my expertise to aid peers, leading discussions between engineers, product, and field members, and designing and writing out core features.